Reel Hub: Arthur Penn at HFA

Arthur Penn, American Auteur
Harvard Film Archive (HFA)
Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Friday-Monday
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Filmmaker Arthur Penn's reputation rests so firmly on Bonnie and Clyde (1967), that you could be excused if you thought he only made one good movie. You'd be wrong, of course. It's a point that will be reiterated throughout the weekend as the Harvard Film Archive presents a retrospective of his work.

Penn doesn't get the press that some of his contemporaries do. His themes didn't run together like Martin Scorsese's or Sidney Lumet's, and he didn't weave whole cloth from stylistic tics like Robert Altman or Stanley Kubrick. It's hard to put together a course or write an article about a bunch of movies that aren't very similar. But Penn is an auteur in the older sense of the term -- a craftsman whose mark is indelible on any old shack of a film -- and his work is worth your time.

Bostonist recommends spending Saturday with the director. Other HFA screenings will give you a better idea of the breadth of his work, and hardcore cinephiles should not miss Friday's screening of The Chase (1966), Penn's harrowing indictment of small-town America. But Saturday's films cut to the heart of Penn's work, offering stirring examples of his success and his failure. And it doesn't hurt that Penn will be on hand to answer up to them.

Night Moves (1975, screening at 7pm) is the best of the three. It's one of the neo-noir flicks that flooded cinemas in the early 70s. Gene Hackman plays cuckolded private eye Harry Moseby, an angry and hapless man who is not easy to like. He wouldn't mind; he doesn't much like himself. Given the opportunity to skip town on a case, Moseby bites immediately and finds himself chasing a washed up actress (Melanie Griffith in her first screen performance) into Florida's heart of darkness and a convoluted conspiracy that he never quite figures out.

Hackman plays Moseby with a run-down grit that gives the character a naturalism that's lacking in similar films. His performance avoids the showy allure of Jack Nicholson's turn in Chinatown as much as the bummy charm of Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye. For all that, there is something sexy about Hackman's performance: as Moseby drifts further away from the truth -- about himself as well as his case -- we can't help but float away with him.

By the end of the film, Penn left the noir movie gutted, the noir hero impotent, and the genre primed for another revival that would be twenty years in coming. Penn's most underrated movie is in many ways the one that remains most contemporary.

If Penn's neo-noir was a slug to the temple, his take on the Western was a fistful of blanks. Despite Dustin Hoffman's unusually good performance (Penn had him working at the outer limits of his talent), Little Big Man (1970, screening at 3pm) never wriggles out of its own trap. Caught between an indictment of white (and square) imperialism and a doe-eyed celebration of a Native American culture that it doesn't actually comprehend, the film can't get its point across. Still, it's hilarious in parts and an interesting artifact of the Vietnam era, even as its length (150 minutes) outstretches its material.

Mickey One (1965, screening as a double-feature with Night Moves), by contrast, clocks in at a tidy 93 minutes, not one of which is wasted. Whether that proves to delight or infuriate you will say a lot about your artistic temperament. Critics who accuse Penn of aping the French New Wave often cite this film as Exhibit A. Warren Beatty plays an existential anti-hero (he doesn't even have a name!), a comedian on the lam who eventually endures a long, dark night of surreal self-reflection. When Beatty delivers his comedy routine to an empty room festooned with mirrors you'll either flee the theater in disgust or shiver with recognition. As for Bostonist? We'll tell you when the lights are out and the projector is flickering.

Promotional still of Mickey One from HFA website; trailer of Night Moves posted on youtube.com. Just try to keep the Bob Seger out of your head.